Skate 2Review

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Black Box returns to San Van with some new trucks on the same old deck.

By Chris Roper

When EA Black Box dropped Skate onto store shelves in September 2007, it not only put up the first real competition for the long-time king Tony Hawk franchise, but wiped the floor with it. Selling twice as many copies as Activision's near decade-old series, it was a big hit with gamers due in large part to its Fight Night-inspired Flickit control system where the right analog stick was used to perform most of your moves.

The studio is back with the follow-up, the aptly-titled Skate 2. While there have been a number of additions to the formula to add in things that gamers really wanted to see after playing the first one, like hand plants, it's clear that Black Box was sticking closely to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule. After all, Neversoft had been trying to reinvent its Tony Hawk franchise almost every year and it had long been having a hard time making many of the new directions for the series stick.

What we've wound up with then is a sequel that in many ways improves upon and even fixes elements from the first game, but at the same time doesn't feel as fresh as it could. It also is a little disappointing in the spots were improvements weren't made, especially with regards to things like the story presentation.

Click the image to watch the video review.

Let's start with the new control options. As mentioned, the core Flickit mechanics have remained exactly the same, with additions coming as just that rather replacements. The result is that veterans of the first title can hop in and immediately begin tearing up the city like before. Once you decide it's time to try out a hand plant or grab during a grind, you can fit those into your repertoire quite easily.

Do these additions drastically change the game? No, not really. Hand plants are a great addition simply because they're a major part of skating, but foot plants, hippy jumps and the like are all just nice to have, but not necessary. In most of my time with the game, I found that I needed to remind myself to try these out to keep them being used. Otherwise, I pretty much stuck with what I had been using the first time around and I was perfectly fine with that.

While most of the new moves work as expected in theory, not all of them work as smoothly as I would have liked to have seen. Hand plants work great when you're hitting the top of a quarter-pipe, but if you're trying to air off a ramp and plant on something higher, like a balcony, you're going to run into problems as it gets really touchy in these cases. Likewise, you can stick out one of your legs during a grab now, but your skater is rather slow to do so. Unless you catch a ton of air, you're going to have problems pulling this off.

Back... to the Future!

New control options don't end with the trick set. You can now get off your board and explore San Van on foot, which is great for getting up a set of stairs quickly or staying still so you can look around and plot your next line. Getting off your board also enables you to move bits of the world around, which is perhaps the biggest addition to the franchise this time around.

Moving objects around and setting up your own line is great, but moving your skater around on foot is borderline terrible. The camera is janky and your movement is so stiff and unnatural that you're almost always fighting the controls to get your skater to do what you want him to. While it's kind of easy to line up objects exactly where you want them, just getting your skater to be in the right place to grab said objects can be a pain. Really, it's hard to believe that something that seems as simple as character movement was implemented so poorly. It's obvious this is a side effect of how the controls were set up for on-board action, but a bigger effort to separate the way the engine handles being on the board versus off of it should have been worked on.